


Passing Through Gethsemane

by Steerpike13713



Series: Nerys Ghemor AU [1]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Episode s03e05: Second Skin, False Memories, Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Identity Issues, Repressed Memories, Species Dysphoria
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-23 01:41:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10709481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steerpike13713/pseuds/Steerpike13713
Summary: AU branching off the end of 'Second Skin'. What if the Cardassians were telling the truth?





	Passing Through Gethsemane

“What do you mean, ‘nothing you can do’?” Nerys demanded, glaring at Doctor Bashir from the bio-bed, her face screwed up against the light. “I’m _Cardassian_! If they can do this to me, there has to be a way for you to put me back!”

Bashir wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Yes,” he said, “That’s the problem. Major…you _were_ put back.”

An awful cold feeling slid into Nerys’ chest like a knife. “What do you mean?”

“I…I’ve run every test I can think of, and they all come up the same,” Bashir said apologetically, “You’re – physically – Cardassian. Right down to the internal structure, and there’s nothing in the known universe that can shift that around so quickly. You were gone less than a day before you woke up and something this extensive…this would be _months_ of work for a full team of doctors, and probably you’d have still felt pain when you woke up afterwards.”

Nerys froze. “That’s impossible!” she snapped. “It would’ve shown up – on medical records, _something_ -!”

“Yours are rather scarce,” Bashir pointed out, “And from the outside…a routine physical doesn’t scan every organ, and most of them are in similar places. It’s only if you look at the structures themselves that you’d notice a difference. Before that…” he shrugged, “I suspect keeping you alive was the priority, not examining why your spleen was the wrong colour and two inches higher than it ought to be.”

Nerys shook her head. “This…it’s another trick. They did something-”

Her breathing was coming faster now, quick and shallow. She should’ve known – this was a much longer game than she had thought. Maybe the Legate had been in on it, maybe this was just- Just what? What could possibly be gained for Cardassia by destroying the life of one Bajoran rebel? And that new tide within her mind was rising again, overtaking her the same way it had on the Defiant on the way back from Cardassia. Just more Cardassian brainwashing, all of it – Legate Ghemor, and the memories, and the way the whole world was suddenly too bright, too cold, too _much_ for her.

On the Defiant, it had felt like the whole world had gone away – there was only the memory of…of she didn’t know what, except that it wasn’t _hers_. She’d never listened to her grandmother singing in Kardasi as she braided back her hair, never sat on her mother’s lap as Kaleen Ghemor applied pasht to her chufa and kinat’hU. She was Kira Nerys. Her mother had died at Singha. Her grandmother had been dead years before Nerys was even thought of. But just then, the false memories had seemed to fill the whole world, until the voice had come, warm and calm and reassuring, and she had wanted to trust it automatically-

_“Your hands, Iliana. Look at your hands. Describe them to me – can you do that?”_

And she had looked. She did not remember what she had said. There had been another question, after that, but she couldn’t quite grasp what it had been – her mind kept skittering away from it. And she had come back to herself, to find the Legate’s hands on her shoulders, and the Legate himself kneeling in front of her, with her colleagues and Garak just feet away, looking hopelessly lost.

“Major?” Bashir said, and abruptly she was back in the now again, in the sickbay on DS9, her head still spinning. Another after-effect of the drugs they’d given her, probably. It would fade in time. She stared down at her hands – her grey, scaled hands – and did not even try to repress the shudder that came over her then.

“Yes?” she nearly croaked.

“I need to inform Commander Sisko,” he informed her. “I…if you’d rather not be here for…”

“ _No_.” She straightened up a bit further. “I’ll stay.”

The Commander was not long in arriving. He must’ve been waiting for this, or something like this – she’d been in no state to explain what was going on in the Defiant, shaking and sweating and screaming as whatever drugs the Cardassians had been dosing her with worked their way through her system. He still looked taken aback to see her like this – grey, scaled, ridged, long black hair loose around her shoulders, neck-ridges on display in a way that felt _indecent_ somehow – more indecent, even, than having the ridges in the first place. This skin – she wanted to scratch off every filthy scale of it, she’d flay herself alive if it meant there was a chance of seeing her own face again in the mirror.

“Major,” Sisko said, nodding, before turning to Bashir. “I thought you said you could reverse it.”

“I thought I could,” Bashir said, casting an apologetic look at Nerys. “There…ah…there doesn’t seem to be anything to reverse.”

Sisko’s eyes narrowed. “Explain.”

Bashir tapped the console, “Here’s a basic Bajoran anatomy,” he said simply, “And here’s a Cardassian one. I did a full scan on Major Kira when she arrived – the first she’s had since before the Occupation ended. This is what came up.”

Nerys craned her neck to see and – there it was. Three neat anatomical outlines. Bajoran, Cardassian. Cardassian again. _Cardassian_. Oh, Prophets give her strength, was that supposed to be _her_?

“How is this possible?” Sisko demanded, still talking to Bashir. “Wouldn’t it have come out in any of her physicals?"

“A basic examination doesn't go this deep," Bashir repeated, "And all things considered, the Major's in excellent health, so she's hardly visited the infirmary since the Occupation ended. If there had been any serious medical issues, I rather assumed she would _know_!”

“This…this is a mistake,” Nerys muttered, more to herself than anyone else, and then, more clearly. “I want a second opinion.”

Both Sisko and Bashir turned to look at her almost as one.

“Are you certain of this, Major?” Sisko asked, his voice perfectly level.

Bashir, next to him, looked nervous. “There’s nowhere to go for one but Bajor. Major, if this is real, and all the evidence suggests it is-”

“It _isn’t_ ,” Nerys gritted out. “It can’t be.”

Bashir swallowed. “I understand that this is…difficult…” he began, but Nerys cut him off with  burst of high-pitched, slightly mad laughter.

“You _understand_? How could _you_ understand? What do you know about being…rewritten like this? Feeling like your body, your _mind_ isn’t your own any more, that someone came along and turned you into the opposite of everything you were! Everything’s wrong – this place, it’s too bright, too cold, and it _shouldn’t_ be, I was fine until a few days ago! I’m seeing things that couldn’t- that never happened, and I’m going to have to leave this sickbay and go about my life on this station looking like a- a _fucking_ Cardassian! What would you know about _any_ of that, Doctor?”

Bashir’s face seemed to freeze for a moment, something shuttering behind his eyes. “Very little,” he admitted. “Still…if you do get a second opinion on Bajor, and it comes back the same way-”

“It won’t.”

Bashir was bright – even Nerys, who had cordially loathed him for the best part of two years, could admit that – but he was young, and he was inexperienced, and he wasn’t an expert in either Cardassian or Bajoran physiology. Back on Bajor, with doctors who knew what they were about and could tell a Cardassian from a Bajoran without cutting them open, she’d get the truth she needed.

“Major, what exactly is going on?” Sisko said, and his voice was hard now. “All Garak’s intelligence said was that you were being held on Cardassia, in the home of Legate Ghemor. A legate who is now completely convinced that you are a Cardassian, and his daughter. He’s asked to see you more than once already.”

Nerys shook her head. “It’s…they set it up as a trap for him,” she said dully. “He had dissident sympathies – they must’ve hoped that seeing- seeing someone he thought was Iliana would make him desperate enough to go against the Obsidian Order.”

Sisko gave her a shrewd, sidelong look, “That seems rather a lot of effort to go to for one dissident, Major.”

“I don’t know why they did it! These are _Cardassians_ , remember? Twisty, overcomplicated bastards to a man. The Legate was part of their Central Command – maybe they couldn’t make him disappear without evidence.” Nerys shook her head. “I need a second opinion – I can’t live the rest of my life like _this_!” she gestured to herself – scales, ridges and who knew what else – and hated how desperate she sounded. She closed her eyes against the light, which felt suddenly overwhelming. She could _feel_ herself, on the edge of another wave of foreign memory, the pattern into which the Cardassians had forced her mind, so there was no part of Kira Nerys that had not betrayed her.

She was Kira Nerys. Her parents were Kira Taban and Kira Meru. Her brothers had been Kira Reon and Kira Pohl. She had been born in the Dakhur province and grown up behind the walls of the Singha Refugee Camp – refugee camp! It had been a labour camp, pure and simple. She had never run, tearful, to her father the Gul when her pet vompăt had died. She had never listened to Hebitian folk-tales at the knee of her grandmother’s housekeeper, or tasted zabU stew so rich and flavourful her mouth watered even now at the memory of it. A memory that was not hers, that she never wanted and pushed away, now, just as she pushed away the image of her own dead, Bajoran face. It had been a trick. A simulation, a hologram – a clone, even. She wouldn’t put it past the Obsidian Order to force-grow a copy of her, just to be killed at the right moment and used for…whatever scheme this was.

“Major? Major!” Sisko’s voice.

Nerys’ eyes snapped open again. “Yes?” she nearly barked, trying to ignore the way she was shaking now, all over.

Sisko was watching her carefully now, “Were you having another fit? Like the one on the Defiant?”

“No- so what if I were! It doesn’t prove anything!”

Sisko’s eyes flicked downwards, then back to her face. “Major…in the Defiant, you were speaking Kardasi.”

“There was hardly anyone in the Resistance who didn’t pick up a bit of it – the bastards wouldn’t _deign_ to use our own language. The fits…probably just withdrawal from whatever drugs they were using to try and get me to play along with them-”

“Major, there were no traces of any sort of drug in your system.”

Nerys stared at Bashir. “ _What_?”

Bashir looked every bit as confused and alarmed by all of this as Nerys felt. “If there were any drugs in your system, they’d cycled out by the time you arrived back at the station,” he said, and swallowed. “It’s possible these could just be withdrawal symptoms, I supposed, but combined with the rest of the evidence-”

“The ‘evidence’ is nothing of the kind! I _know_ who I am!”

Doctor Bashir nodded. “Of course you do.” He didn’t even sound like he was humouring her, even as he turned away. “In any case, there’s nothing medically wrong with you, and I can’t undo a surgery I can find no evidence ever happened.”

“What- I’m _stuck_ like this?”

She could taste bile now, and suddenly the hated scales felt so much more obtrusive, the strangeness of this changed body all the more noticeable, the weight of the mane of black, feathery-feeling Cardassian hair she had somehow acquired in surgery almost intolerable.

“If I arrange for a second opinion-” Bashir started.

“Oh, you bet your life you’re going to – maybe then you’ll accept that this is just more Cardassian trickery!”

Bashir nodded, looking solemn. “I hope it is. But…until such time as we have proof either way, there’s nothing more I can do for you.”

Nerys nodded brusquely, and forced herself to stand. “Am I free to go, then?”

“Medically, yes. Commander?”

There was a little crease between Sisko’s eyebrows now. “We can delay the debriefing until after you’ve recovered a little,” he said, an unexpected show of restraint. “Tomorrow morning, say. Oh-nine-hundred hours, station time?”

“I don’t need to _recover_ -” Nerys snapped, then stopped, because that was patently untrue. Her head was still spinning, she was still squinting against the light – how had she never noticed before, how _bright_ it was in here? – and she was still probably going through withdrawal. She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “I’ll be in my quarters,” she said shortly. She didn’t want anyone to see her like this. Bad enough that Sisko and Dax and Bashir had done. “Oh-nine-hundred,” she repeated, catching Sisko’s eye. He nodded.

She had not reckoned on Legate Ghemor, and was brought up short when she stepped out of sickbay to find him pacing back and forth outside, apparently heedless of the glares he was attracting from the Bajoran nurses.

“Iliana!” He’d caught her hands between his own before Nerys knew what was happening. “I was worried about you,” he added, in a slightly softer voice. “They kept you in there for a long while.” One hand reached up to brush down the side of her face, a thumb flickering out to trace the new ridges around her eye.

Nerys pulled away. “Don’t- Don’t call me that. They…” she swallowed, “They couldn’t tell for sure,” she lied. “Doctor Bashir’s calling in a second opinion from Bajor.”

The Legate looked at her for a few long moments, still holding her hands to his heart. “You still don’t believe it, then?”

She’d wept in his arms, on Cardassia. And he’d stroked her hair and murmured soothing nonsense and betrayed his own planet to keep her safe. She didn’t know what to do with that. Slippery opportunists like Garak, smug oppressors like Dukat, even poor wretches like Marritza she knew what to do with, but to feel _gratitude_ to a Cardassian….everything in her recoiled from the thought.

“I’ve seen no evidence that can convince me I’m not who I always was,” she said flatly. “All of it – what happened on the Defiant. It’s just withdrawal symptoms. I expect I won’t even remember what I said in a week or two.”

There was a long, pained silence.

“I should thank you,” Ghemor said at last, “For taking me with you when your…when Starfleet arrived to assist.” His eyes flicked back along towards the Promenade. “That Garak fellow, who helped you – helped us. How well do you know him?”

“Better than I’d like,” Nerys admitted, her mouth twisting. “The whole command staff knows what he is, and who he used to work for. Not that it’s stopped some idiots from trusting him anyway.”

Ghemor nodded, looking distinctly relieved. “He was exiled before the Obsidian Order’s last change in leadership – under Enabran Tain. With anyone else, I’d say any man Tain disliked that much must have _some_ redeeming qualities, but Regnar was his right hand for years, and the one thing that was widely known about him was that he would do anything if he thought it would create an advantage for the Order.”

“Or for himself,” Nerys muttered – certainly she had seen enough examples of that in the Cardassian ranks during the Occupation.

Ghemor spread his hands, “Presumably. I never got to hear of his private indiscretions, but Tain must have offered him something truly impressive to have kept his loyalty so long. Don’t trust him, Il- _Nerys_ , ever. Even if you don’t believe anything else I say, listen to me now. He’s a dangerous man, and would sell out you and all of your friends in an instant if he thought it would help him.”

“I’ll keep my eye on him,” Nerys promised, and shifted. “Will you be staying, then?”

The Legate nodded. “I think so. At least for a while. Until you’ve ridden out the worst of these…attacks.”

“You really don’t have to do that,” Nerys said stiffly. “I can manage alone.”

“That is your decision, of course – but can you blame me for being concerned?”

Nerys stared at him. “You met me _days_ ago, and I’ve spent most of that time screaming at you and bringing the Obsidian Order down on your head.”

The Legate’s eyes never left her face. “Be that as it may…” He looked, abruptly, very like the young Gul Nerys should not remember, who had wiped away her tears with clawed, gentle fingers in a memory that was not hers. “Regardless of what your second opinion says…I’ve been alone for three years. Longer. And then Entek said they’d found you, and even before you came, the world seemed so much brighter. Even knowing that- that Iliana would never understand what I had done. Whether or not you really are my daughter, you are the nearest thing to family I have left.”

Nerys was still for a moment. This- this would be so much easier if Bashir had given her a clear answer. When she didn’t have to deal with a terror at the core of her that was like hope turned inside-out – she knew she wasn’t Cardassian, could not be anything further from Cardassian, what Entek had claimed could not possibly be true…but it _might_ be. It would be easier if he weren’t a dissident. Or if he weren’t kind. If he really were the man she had first met, fully-armoured and barking gruffly at Entek for keeping him waiting in his own house. Tekeny Ghemor was an honourable man. He had lost his world today, and soon enough he would lose whatever hope he was still clinging to that she might be his Iliana. It wasn’t weakness to show a little consideration for that, in exchange for all he’d done.

“Have you been assigned quarters yet?”

Ghemor shook his head, “I think your commander is quite keen to see me leave,” he admitted, with a wry half-smile. “The Mathenite government has offered political asylum to more than a few dissidents, I had planned to accept it.”

“You don’t need to stay for my sake,” Nerys said, trying not to feel warmed by the concern.

“It’s no hardship.”

Nerys didn’t have an answer for that. “I don’t think guest quarters will be ready this soon…”

Ghemor’s brow-ridges lifted. “I think I’ll manage.”

“No, I mean – I have a sofa, in my quarters. Dax has slept on it before. Then we- you can sort out other arrangements in the morning.” Nerys cut herself off before she could make it any worse.

Ghemor’s expression was faintly puzzled, his body language shifting in ways Nerys could not read. “If you’re certain,” he said, and the hope in his voice was almost too much for her. “It’s a good thing I was expecting you to be used to diurnal timekeeping – I never quite got the trick of it, myself. Is it always so _bright_ here?”

“It…didn’t used to feel that way,” Nerys admitted, then wished she hadn’t. He could only read that as encouraging, and it felt cruel to toy with his hopes now, after everything. “I expect it’s just something in the drugs.”

Ghemor nodded, with a rueful sort of smile. “Of course.”

They attracted a few stares on their way through to the habitat ring. Nerys could hardly blame them – everyone on the station knew her attitude towards Cardassians already, and seeing her in company with one would naturally attract some comment. It wasn’t until the first none-too-quiet mutter of ‘Cardie bitch’ caught her ear that she realised, like a shock of cold water, what it was they were staring at. Her head whipped around as soon as she heard it, and she stopped dead in the middle of the Promenade, her mouth already open to snap back- Then closed it again. What was she supposed to say? She wanted to sleep until the events of the last few days felt far enough away for her to look at them, she was tired and had the beginnings of a headache and there would always be another idiot.

“Nerys?” the Legate asked, looking at her shrewdly. He couldn’t have heard it, could he? Nerys shook her head.

“I’m _fine_. This way.”

Nerys’ quarters were mercifully close to the main part of the station – one of the benefits of being command staff – but every step of the way, now, she could feel the eyes on her, an uneasy prickle between her shoulder-blades. They weren’t very far, now, from where Marritza had been stabbed. The awareness of that hit her then, out of nowhere, and the squirming unease it awoke in her was something entirely new. The Legate seemed to pick up on her unease, and kept shooting worried looks at her whenever he thought she wasn’t looking.

“Here,” she said flatly, when they reached the door, and pressed her hand to the access lock, only for it to beep and flare red at her. She muttered a curse in Bajoran – of course the damned Cardassians would have altered her palmprint as well – and said, aloud.

“Kira Nerys.”

Her voice, thank the Prophets, hadn’t changed. The door slid open, and she was abruptly aware that she hadn’t exactly made much of an effort to tidy the place before she’d left. The thought felt absurd – she didn’t have that many possessions to keep neat, and Ghemor knew that she’d left in a hurry. Why did she even care what the Legate made of her quarters, anyway? He’d be gone as soon as the final confirmation came in that she wasn’t who he was still so obviously hoping she would somehow turn out to be. Still, she was very aware of the Legate’s eyes on everything, and on her.

“You’re a worshipper of the Prophets?” he asked, nodding towards her little altar against the far wall.

“I’m Bajoran. Most of us are.” Those that weren’t tended to live off-planet, and had done even before the Occupation. Perhaps especially then – the old theocracy, D’jarras and temples and the will of the Prophets, had not been especially hospitable to such people. “I know Cardassia doesn’t go in for that sort of thing.”

Legate Ghemor smiled, “Not any longer, no. But pockets still exist in secret, here and there. Most are part of the dissident movement by necessity, as the present nature of Cardassian society does not favour such beliefs.”

She had been expecting more of a reaction than that. Then again, the Legate had cheated her of every reaction she’d tried to wring from him from the moment they were introduced. She had wanted anger, had wanted outraged pride and smug self-assurance and all the other grand displays that reminded her every time she saw them who the enemy was. Ghemor just nodded, still looking around, and there was something on his face that she refused to think of as fondness or recognition.

“You can have the bed, if you want it,” she said, “I’ll be fine through here, and you’re old enough it’s probably a bad idea to make you take the couch.”

Ghemor raised his brow-ridges at her, “I’ve slept under worse conditions, I’ll have you know.”

“How recently was that?”

The Legate’s expression went still for a moment, then slipped into something almost rueful as he took another look at the couch. “Ah. I take your point.”

Sleep was a long time in coming for Nerys that night, and when it did her dreams were dark and confused. Bone-carvings and riding hounds and the sound of Kardasi folk-songs mingled with childhood games of springball, with the gnawing ache of hunger that had been her closest companion for nearly all her life, with the feeling of a disruptor in her hands and the sight of a mother hara cat, lying dead with her cubs pawing desperately at her body, mewling and pleading in high, sweet, plaintive voices.

When she woke, it was still dark, the dark of the station’s night cycle, and for a moment she could not think what it was that had woken her. There was…something. Not scent, not sight, not taste, but with elements of all three. It ought to have been overwhelming, confusing, terrifying, but instead… _safety_ , that sixth sense whispered to her. _Home. Kin. You are home_ , it said with every breath, _you are safe here_ , and drifting there on the edge of sleep Nerys felt at once almost weightless and so profoundly tethered that there could be no dislodging her. And, in the moment before she came fully awake, that feeling frightened her more than anything she had seen in all her years of fighting.

Her eyes snapped open in the dark of her living room and she sat up stiffly, the weight of her long hair catching her by surprise as it fell over the hateful new ridges at her neck, tickling at them and making her all too aware of how sensitive they were, how much a part of this body she was trapped in. It was full dark now, just the stars and the faint glow of the wormhole from just beyond her windows to light her quarters, but she could see quite clearly. She tried to breathe in, to centre herself, but still with every breath a hundred new- she couldn’t call them scents, or sights, or tastes, but somehow all three at once. The stale, chemical edge of processed air, the chill of the artificial atmosphere, and other sensations, stranger ones, that she had no name for. She tried to hold her breath against it, but that could only last so long and soon she was gasping for air that twisted and turned to a thousand other things in her throat, on her tongue. _Prophets,_ she thought desperately, dizzily, _what am I supposed to do?_

She looked up, caught sight of her reflection in the mirror on the far side of the room, and nearly knocked the table over scrambling backwards at the sight of the red gleam of Cardassian eyes in darkness, the old tell-tale that had been such a gift to Resistance snipers during the Occupation. Her eyes. Those were- How had they _done_ that to her eyes? She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t- She could feel another fit coming on and gritted her teeth, digging overlong nails into her forearm, working them under the scales to see if they would peel off and reveal smooth Bajoran skin beneath. The blood that welled up from underneath the scales was too dark, too thick to be Bajoran, and Nerys felt her gorge rising at the sight of it, unable to believe it was coming from her despite the stinging pain in her arm – it was seeping up now from between the scales, and the air stank of it, the taste seeming to coat Nerys’ tongue and fill her throat like smoke, so that she could almost choke on it.

She was Kira Nerys. She had been born in Dakhur Province, and her first memories were of the Singha Refugee Camp. She had had two brothers who died before Nerys was ten years old. Her mother she did not remember at all, but she had not strung jewelled ornaments in Nerys’ hair or read to her from _The Labyrinth of Gul Tabor_. Her father had been Kira Taban, a gardener from the Dakhur Province who had been cut down by the Cardassians when she had been barely twenty. He had told her that it was every Bajoran’s duty to protect Bajor…but now the memory flickered, and the face was Legate Ghemor’s, twenty years younger, his hair still thick and dark, explaining earnestly that the protection of Cardassia was every Cardassian’s duty and that was why he was so often away. She dug her nails into the ridges around her eyes, hating the feeling of those little spurs of hardened scale. She had been twenty when Kira Taban died – had he ever suspected the mura bird in the nest? Or- No. No. It was just the drugs. She knew who she was. She was Kira Nerys. She _had_ to be Kira Nerys because if she wasn’t…someone else would take back these eyes, this mind, this body. Someone named Iliana, who had joined the Obsidian Order by choice, because she had thought it her duty. Someone who had said, without a hint of irony, that she was doing the right thing by going to Bajor to betray the Resistance from within. How much of herself would have been chipped away if she’d been left on Cardassia much longer? How long would it have been before they had her parroting back every word of what they were trying to condition her into, how long, how long-

No. She was Kira Nerys. She could only be Kira Nerys. Sooner or later, she would believe it again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Tinsnip for much of the Cardassian terminology, and to Prevailing for shaping some of my ideas on the subject. I am a great admirer of both your work and no infringement is intended.  
> The title comes from an episode of Babylon 5 with a premise which is...not actually all that similar, but similar enough to justify stealing a title I thought was a lot snappier than the one I originally had planned.  
> Mura birds are a Cardassian species I first found in Tinsnip's work. I have elaborated upon them here slightly - they are brood predators native to central Cardassia, as common as pigeons in Kardasi'Or itself and often used on Cardassia as a metaphor for the dangers of adoption.


End file.
